Among the many adjectives one might use to describe a dystopian noir novel featuring a hired killer, fun is rarely the first choice. But Adam Sternbergh's first novel, Shovel Ready, is a real kick. "Think of me more like a bullet," the protagonist tells a prospective client. "Just point. I'm not FedEx. I don't deliver messages. You need a therapist, that's a different number."
After a dirty bomb decimates Times Square, tourists disappear and the city's inhabitants run for the suburbs--all but the rich in their secure high rises and the poor in their tent camps in Central Park. Sternbergh's near-future New York City is frighteningly credible, and the former garbage collector–turned-assassin Spademan knows it as only a sanitation worker can. He can find a target anywhere from midtown to Brooklyn, where "gangs of men with masks and hammers might still visit your brownstone, but they're not coming to renovate your kitchen." His hardboiled façade masks grief over the loss of his wife in the bomb attack and is easily breached when he hears the story of his pregnant runaway target's mistreatment at the hands of her father.
Sternbergh, a former editor-at-large at New York magazine and current culture editor of the New York Times Magazine, layers elements of sci-fi, Die Hard-like action flicks and noir fiction into the kind of entertaining mashup that seems to suit our world of box-cutter homicides, dirty bombs and virtual heavens. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.